In Need of a Smile?

Photo by Visual Hunt

Following our incredible discussion on punctuation, I thought I’d punctuate (see what I did there?) the discussion with what others have to say about the subject. And besides, given the current air of politics, we might be in need of some smiles…

"I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period." -- Steve Martin



“I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.” -- Issac Marion 


“I use a whole lot of half-BLEEP semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.” -- Ursula LeGuin


“If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.” -- Mary Norris


“While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time.” – Lynne Truss

“Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont, see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,,” -- Daniel Keyes



“What sort of person," said Salzella patiently, "sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.” -- Terry Pratchett

Photo by Visual Hunt

Wishing you smiles!

Bobbi Miller

Basic Rules for Punctuating Dialogue

In honor of last weekend's National Punctuation Day, we've been running a short series of posts on punctuation. JoAnn kicked off the topic by sharing some great links, one to a site I've never seen: Khan Academy. If you didn't follow that link and you have difficulty identifying run-on sentences, I encourage you to head over there as soon as you finish reading this post. Next, Carla shared a terrific example from her own work of how wise punctuation choices can help engage the reader. Before I wrap-up this series, I want to thank everyone who entered our giveaway of Cheryl Klein's The Magic Words, and to congratulate our winner, Cathy M!

The biggest punctuation challenge for my beginning students--both adults and children--seems to be dialogue. When I was a novice writer trying to understand how to punctuate dialogue, I studied examples in published works. Since I started out as a freelance newspaper writer (aka "stringer"), those early examples were quotes in newspaper and magazine articles. Later, when I turned to fiction, I modeled the punctuation I used on that in the novels on my shelves. Fortunately, they were all American publications, so the use of punctuation was consistent. I later discovered that British publications follow different rules, rules that are almost the direct opposite of ours. No wonder so many of my students were confused!  For a brief overview of the differences, see this page of The Punctuation Guide.

quinn.anya via VisualHunt.com

When I teach dialogue, I give my students a handout with some basic rules and corresponding examples. Here are the first three:

1. All dialogue should be set off with beginning and ending double quotation marks.

          “Come here, Lassie.”

2. Make sure you start a new paragraph whenever a speaker changes.

          “Where’s the barn?” I asked. “The river? The swimming hole?”
          “Oh, Sal,” my father said. “Come on. There’s Margaret.” He waved to the lady at the door.
          “We have to go back. I forgot something.”    

(Can you tell me what book the above example is taken from?)

3. If the dialogue is preceded by text, put a comma after the introductory text:

          Dad shouted, “Put that down now!”

As time went on, I kept adding more rules and examples. Then I found this page at The Editor's Blog. I've listed the site as a reference at the end of my handout so I don't have to update it anymore.

quinn.anya via Visualhunt

If you're looking for lesson plans on teaching punctuation, check out "And I Quote: A Punctuation Proofreading Minilesson" and "The Passion of Punctuation", both at Read. Write. Think. Both also contain links to additional punctuation resources.

To wrap us this celebration of National Punctuation Day, I suggest you read these Top Ten Tips at The Punctuation Guide.

Also, before you head over to check out this week's Poetry Friday roundup at Karen Edmisten's blog, you might enjoy reading these children's poems about punctuation.

And don't forget to:

Write with Joy!

Carmela

Reminder: There are only a few days left to enter the Goodreads giveaway of my middle-grade novel, Rosa, Sola.

Then BAM! Punctuation and Style

In this new TA series of punctuation and style, I thought I’d show an example from my book 

Fourth Down and Inches: 

Concussions and Football’s Make-or-Break Moment.  

I chose this for today because it demonstrates how to blend facts with punctuation and style to make readable and exciting text.   

The following passage is on page 41 of the book.  In this section I’m using a creative way to explain what happens on the football field when a player gets a concussion.  Before the reader gets to this page, I’ve explained exactly what a concussion is.  In this section I’m showing what happens in the brain when a concussion happens.    

FROM PAGE 41 OF Fourth Down and Inches: Concussions and Football’s Make-or-Break Moment (Carolrhoda):

The player lines up. He concentrates on his job. He anticipates his opponent’s move. His blood is pumping. The ball is snapped. Instinct and memory of countless hours on the practice field take over. Like instruments in an orchestra blending together to play a symphony, every part of the player’s body is working in perfect harmony.

In the player’s brain, one hundred billion neurons are sending and receiving messages at lightning speed to make it all happen. Heart beat. Lungs breathe. Pick up your feet. Move your arm. Look at the coach. Remember the play. The neurons transmit these messages through a long fiber, called an axon, that is attached to each neuron. This information moves down the axon through an orderly chemical process. When the message gets to the end of the axon, a neurotransmitter transmits the message to the next cell. And so on. And so on.

Then BAM!  An outside force causes the player’s brain to crash into the side of the skull. Then it bounces off and crashes into the other side of the skull.

The brain, which had been busily transmitting countless messages immediately reacts to this crisis. A chain reaction begins as chemicals in the brain move around in chaos. Message-carrying neurotransmitters are interrupted before they reach the axon. Suddenly, the brain can’t send or receive messages normally.

I intentionally chose this style in this section that is different from the rest of the book.  Here are some of the reasons why I wrote it this way:

1.     I wanted to grab the attention of the reader by putting them vicariously on the football field. 

2.     I wanted to show the physical and mental aspects of playing football.  

3.     I wanted to inform readers about the one hundred billion neurons and axons in their brains and how they transmit information.

4.     I wanted to inform readers that a concussion disrupts those messages. 

5.     I used a lot of short choppy sentences to indicate fast moving information.

6.     I used some sentence fragments to indicate many things happening simultaneously in a football players body.

7.     I used “Then BAM!” because I wanted to reader to make the jump between a brain working normally, then BAM, a concussion happens and the brain does not work normally.

Since we are looking at punctuation and style today, let’s see which of two paragraphs below is the most interesting.

WHAT I COULD HAVE WRITTEN:

When a football player reacts to the beginning of a play, neurons move fast through their brains to control their body.  Countless neurons and axons transmit messages through their brains. 

WHAT I DID WRITE, AND WHAT IS IN THE BOOK:

In the player’s brain, one hundred billion neurons are sending and receiving messages at lightning speed to make it all happen. Heart beat. Lungs breathe. Pick up your feet. Move your arm. Look at the coach. Remember the play. The neurons transmit these messages through a long fiber, called an axon, that is attached to each neuron. This information moves down the axon through an orderly chemical process. When the message gets to the end of the axon, a neurotransmitter transmits the message to the next cell. And so on. And so on.

Which paragraph do you prefer?  

by 

Carla Killough McClafferty

P.S. from Carmela: Don't forget: Today's the last day to enter for a chance to win editor Cheryl Klein's The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults (Norton)!

Punctuation! Punctuation? Punctuation.

In honor of National Punctuation Day, we Teaching Authors are addressing punctuation in this new series of posts. I’ve seen plenty of run-on sentences lately, so I thought I’d address them here.

This sign shows one of many solutions I’ve seen to the “How do I punctuate this?” dilemma: Do nothing.

Here are some helpful suggestions for what to do with a run-on instead:

• Run-ons - Comma Splices - Fused Sentences from The Purdue Online Writing Lab

• How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth, created by The Oatmeal

• Khan Academy’s Recognizing run-ons and comma splices

Thinking about punctuation, I remembered Lilian Moore’s wonder-filled poem “Winter Dark,” about the punctuation she saw in New York City.

“Soon
there’s a comma of a moon...”

You can read Lilian Moore’s biography and watch Renee LaTulippe and Lee Bennett Hopkins discuss her life and work in the Spotlight on NCTE Poets series at No Water River.  (Scroll down to read the whole poem in the spread from Mural on Second Avenue.) While you’re there, be sure to check out the rest of the series!

Just for fun, watch Victor Borge’s hilarious Phonetic Punctuation routine. And don’t forget to enter our Teaching Authors Book Giveaway to win a copy of Cheryl Klein’s The Magic Words. The giveaway is open to U.S. residents and ends September 26.

I’m thrilled to be heading to Poetry Camp at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, where I’ll meet in person many poets I know only through poems and blog posts. And our own April will be there, too! Yippee!

Today’s Poetry Friday Roundup is at Reading to the Core. Enjoy!

JoAnn Early Macken

Happy Punctuation Day!

One of the most important punctuation marks goes about quietly, doing its job without any notice or fanfare. It’s also the oldest of all punctuation marks, dating back to ancient Greece. It’s used a thousand times in every book. As Noah Lukeman (A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, 2006) suggests, “…it alone can make or break a work.”  What is it?

The paragraph break! 

Once upon a time, reading was hard work. There was no punctuation, no white-space, no lower case letters. There was nothing to indicate when one thought ended and the next one began.

Pilcrow symbol. Source at Image:Pilcrow.svg    

The pilcrow was the first punctuation mark. The word originated from the Greek paragraphos, (para=beside and graphos=to write). This led to the Old French, paragraph. This evolved into pelagraphe, and then to pelegreffe. Middle English transformed it into pylcrafte, and finally to pilcrow. 

Around 200 AD, paragraphs were very loosely understood as a change in topic, speaker, or stanza. But there was no consistency in these markings. Initially, some used the letter K, for Kaput, which is Latin for head. By the 12th century, scribes began using C, for Capitulum, Latin for little head or chapter. This C evolved because of inconsistencies in handwriting. By late medieval time, the pilcrow was a very elaborate decoration in bright red ink inserted in between shapeless paragraphs.

Villanova, Rudimenta Grammaticæ. Published 1500 in Valencia (Spain).. Licensed under Public Domain

As printing technology improved, and whitespace was deemed valuable in the reading process, pilcrows were dropped down to indicate a new line. Eventually the pilcrows were abandoned, and the paragraph indent was born. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that a standard method was devised to help organize paragraphs. Alexander Bain introduced the modern paragraph in 1866, defining it as a single unit of thought, and stressing the importance of an explicit topic sentence.

Just as a period divides sentences, a paragraph divides groups of sentences. But as the period is often hailed as the backbone of punctuation, the paragraph break is largely ignored.

The primary purpose of a paragraph is to define a theme, but there are no standard rules that dictate how that process plays out. Paragraphs tend to be organic, subject to the writer’s idiosyncrasies.

Some of us have quite a few idiosyncrasies. <See what I did there?

In a perfect world, a paragraph has a beginning, the main point stated in an explicit topic sentence. It has a middle, in which the writer elaborates on this one main point. And it has an ending, which wraps the entire package in a neat bow.

But the world isn’t perfect. Sometimes the writer places the topic sentence as the last line of a paragraph, playing “gotcha” like a punchline of a joke. Sometimes the topic sentence is a mere whisper, implied in the action. And then there’s the prankster, who places the topic sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Blink and you miss it.

morguefile.com

Further complicating the process, there is no designated length that defines a paragraph. I have some students who insist that a paragraph be five sentences, even when the concept is so complex, it demands more explanation. They call this being succinct, but when I ask them for clarification, it takes them several minutes to explain one sentence. I remind them, succinct does not mean short. Succinct means precise. Meanwhile, some students go to the opposite extreme. They turn in five-page essays that are three – and sometimes less -- very long paragraphs. Their ideas trample over each other, undistinguished from each another, in one stampeding brain dump. Both of these writer types reflect a common issue: they don’t understand, and therefore are not connected to, their own ideas. As Lukeman states, messy breaks reveal messy thinking.

The long and short of it (and all puns intended), paragraphs affect pacing, showing the reader how to approach the text. This is especially true in fiction. Short paragraphs tend to be action-oriented, focusing on moving the plot forward. Long paragraphs slow the action down, and tend to be reflective, either setting the stage for the next chase or revealing character. Too many short paragraphs strung together can wear the reader out. Too many long paragraphs put him to sleep.

So what do I do?

I begin with the basics. I tell my students, first, do your thinking. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, not every opinion is equally weighted. In fact, some are distorted, misinformed, and downright wrong. Next, organize your thinking. Only then can you write it down.  I provide a fixed pattern that the beginning writer can easily manage: 1. Write an explicit topic sentence; 2. Elaborate, in which you explain what you mean by this point, and why is it important; 3. Validate, in which you use evidence to prove that your observations are valid;  4. Illustrate, in which you demonstrate with examples how your observations can be applied in real world time. I compare beginning writers to beginning musicians. Musicians need to learn the notes and play the scales -- over and over and over -- in order to master them. Once they master these notes, only then can they play around, making their own music, and writing their own symphony.

But first, they have to learn the basics.

What do you think?

Bobbi Miller
 

3 things About Commas To Make You Smile

.
Howdy, Campers--and Happy Poetry Friday (original poem and PF link below)!

This is the last of our series about punctuation and related topics. Bobbi started us off with For the Love of Comma (her post was mentioned in Quercus), Esther offers A New Mark of Punctuation (sort of)...,Carla illustrates her point with specific examples from her books in How You Tell the Story Makes a Difference, and Mary Ann pleads, Can We Give the Exclamation Point a Rest?

*    *    *   *

When my son was four, he was lying on the floor leisurely looking at a book one morning when I rushed in. "C'mon, honey--we've gotta go!"

"Okay, Mommy," he said marking his page, "lemme put it on pause."

Don't you love that?

my kiddo...who will be entering medical school in January

Put it on pause.  Commas, line breaks and periods give pause; they remind us to breathe. Like Bobbi, I love commas.  My summer present to you: three things about commas to make you smile:

1) A few years ago, I bought my mom (a true Punctuation Queen) this plaque.  

from signals.com

(Mom loved it.)

2) When my son was in elementary school, I read poetry to his class once a week.  I was trying to be like my teacher, Myra Cohn Livingston: I wanted to share poetry with no strings attached.  As I read, they listened, just listened.  Nothing was expected of them.  I read every poem twice.

At the end of each year, I gave them each a collection of the poems they loved; in third grade, this was one of their favs (make sure to take a big breath before attempting to read it aloud!):

Call the Periods
Call the Commas
By Kalli Dakos

Call the doctors Call the nurses Give me a breath of
air I’ve been reading all your stories but the periods
aren’t there Call the policemen Call the traffic guards
Give me a STOP sign quick Your sentences are running
when they need a walking stick Call the commas Call
the question marks Give me a single clue Tell me
where to breathe with a punctuation mark or two

From If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand; Poems about School by Kalli Dakos, illustrated by Brian Karas (Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1995) 

3) We're told so much about the health benefits of deep breathing; of taking time to slow down. Remember to Breathe, they say.

And just think: as writers, with our very own fingers, we have magic power. Add a comma, push the pause button.

Applause for the Pause
by April Halprin Wayland

A comma,
a breaking line
a period.

A day off,
a week away
summer.

poem (c)2015 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved.

*   *   *   *
And finally, congratulations to TeachingAuthors' latest Book Giveaway Winner:

Em M, who won JoAnn Early Macken's Baby Says Moo wonderful board book--lucky Em!

Poetry Friday is at Carol's Corner this week--thanks for hosting, Carol!

As I said, TeachingAuthors is taking our annual Summer Blogging Break after this post (our sixth annual blogging break, for those of you who are paying attention). We'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail--which technically is Monday, July 13th. So, grab your towel, dive into the pool, and swim a few laps while we're gone ~ TTFN!

posted on a summer's day by April Halprin Wayland--with help from Eli (dog), Snot (cat), and Monkey.

Can We Give the Exclamation Point a Rest?

     Young Author's Camps are well under way. It's Sunday night, and I am anticipating tomorrow's new group of writers. To (sort of) quote Forrest Gump, "Writing campers are like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you are going to get."

    If this camp is true to form, it will be a Whitman's Sampler of writers. Kids whose parents think I am running a remedial writing boot camp despite the Parks' Department naming the program "Writing is Fun!"  (Remember that exclamation point.)  Learning disabled kids.  Kids who are there because their parents need a place to park them for the week...and mine was the only camp that still had openings. (Always flattering to hear, "You're all that was left.") And of course, there are usually some kids who there because they love to write. Usually. Not always.

   For the last several years, every session has had a core of writers for whom English is a second language. No one can put together a perfect English sentence the way a 10-year-old who learned the language in school can. Their subjects and verbs agree, something that seems "optional" to a number of "English only" kids. Tenses don't leap from past to present to future in the same sentence.  Punctuation is meticulous. Speaking of punctuation, these ESOL kids have learned the Power of the Punctuation Point.

    A lot of kids let the exclamation point do all the heavy lifting in a sentence.  Rather than show the reader fear, joy, surprise (fill in the emotion here), they toss big handfuls of exclamation points instead.  A paragraph of five sentences will include six exclamation points. (More is better, right?) After awhile those little points seem to rise off the page in platoons, stabbing at my eyeballs. A slight exaggeration, but after awhile all you see on the page is !!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Example:  I was so sad when we moved!  I left all my friends behind!  I didn't know anybody at school!  I hated school! I was always in a bad mood!  Even my dog was in a bad mood!!!!

    Why are these kids so dependent on the point?  My first thought is to blame texting and email which has shrunk language down to emoticons and acronyms (OMG, LOL, 😄).  But most of my students are not allowed on social media, or have email accounts. Back in the day, teachers blamed comic books for sloppy punctuation (Pow! Biff! Bam!  Take that, Batman!).  I haven't run across any of comic fans among my writers.  Video games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, yes.  Comic books, no.

     There are a handful of chapter book writers who go over the top with the punctuation points for comic effect. I'm not laughing, but the kids are.  Still, even those writers do it a couple of times per book at most, not every sentence.

    It comes back to something I've posted about before...vocabulary.  For my young writers, it is easier to use my two pet peeves, the word "very" combined with an adjective and an exclamation point.  In revision of their work, I encourage them to find another way of expressing the emotion without using "very."

   Example:  The test was very hard!

  Alternatives:  The test was: challenging complicated confusing demanding difficult exhausting puzzling tiring unclear. (Pick one.)

  Each of the alternatives offers a clearer picture of how or why the test was "hard."  Was it physically
hard?  Did your head ache?  Did you write so much your hand hurt?  Or was it hard to understand?  Were the directions unclear?  Did you mix-up your facts?  Or were the questions more difficult than you expected?  Or did it just make you think harder?  "Hard" can mean a lot of things in describing a test.  What exactly did you mean?

    At this point I bring out my trusty thesaurus collection: beginners, intermediate and Roget's.  My students are familiar with the thesaurus...the one on their word processing program.  I compare the meager selection offered by the computer program to the many, many options in the thesaurus. They learn they cannot slide by with what I call "wimp words"...words too general to say what they mean. The substitutions for wimp words are in the thesaurus.  By the end of the week, they have almost eliminated phrases such as very beautiful, very hot, very boring. Instead, flowers are exquisite, days swelter and TV shows uninteresting.

    Once the "enabler" word "very" disappears, the punctuation marks often disappear as well.  At least they do in descriptive passages.  They still seem to show up in dialog.  How else do you show some one is excited?  Example:  "It's raining!" she said excitedly.

   In this case, the culprit is "said." Said is a perfectly good word.  It's meant to be unobtrusive in dialog.  Sometimes, however, you want to know how that sentence is...well...said. How could you show the speaker is excited without that pesky exclamation point?  Swap said for one of the following verbs:  screamed, shouted, yelled, exclaimed, moaned, groaned, cried, wailed, howled, wailed, gasped, choked,shrieked, rejoiced, squealed, cheered, announced.

   If after all those choices the writer still can't let go of that exclamation point, I issue an ultimatum. Two exclamation points for the whole piece.  More than two, I tell the student, "Imagine that I control  the world supply of exclamation points.  If you wan to use on, they are now a hundred dollars apiece."  The silliness of the notion usually makes the writer think twice about using them.

    Again, in the words of Forrest Gump..."And that's all I have to say about that."

    No exclamation point.

    BOOK GIVEAWAY

    Today is the last time to register for our give away of JoAnn Early Macken's board book, BABY SAYS MOO.  For details, see JoAnn's June 12 post.

    Posted by Mary Ann Rodman


   

How You Tell the Story Makes a Difference

As I write nonfiction books, I carefully consider sentence length and punctuation.  Every sentence is crafted in a way that will support the pacing of my (true) story.  Does sentence structure and punctuation affect the pacing of the story?  Absolutely!  How you write the text makes all the difference. 

As an example, let’s consider the opening scene from my book,

Fourth Down and Inches: 

Concussions and Football’s Make-or-Break Moment

 

For more information see my website

I could have begun this book in countless ways.  I chose to begin the book with a young man named Von Gammon because I believe it sets the scene for the whole book.  I wanted to pull the reader in by giving them a glimpse into Von’s life.  Once I decided to open the book with this young man, there were countless ways I could have written the scene. 

Consider the following examples and choose which is more compelling: 

EXAMPLE 1

Von Gammon lay down on the grass.  He told his brother to stand on his hands. Von was strong and could prove it. He could lift his brother who was six feet six inches tall off the ground.  Von was strong and skilled. 

OR…

 

EXAMPLE 2

Von Gammon lay down on the grass and told his brother to stand on his hands. Von was strong, and he could prove it. Then he lifted his brother—all six feet and six inches of him—clear off the ground. And Von wasn’t just strong; he was skilled.

 

The second example is what appears in the published book.  The first example communicates the same information, but doesn’t pull the reader into the story.  The difference is in the sentence structure and punctuation. 

Just a few sentences later, I write about the moment things changed for Von.   Which of the following is more interesting? 

EXAMPLE 1

 

When Von was a sophomore, he played in a football game that took place on October 30.  He was on the University of George team and they were playing the University of Virginia.  Von’s team was behind by seven points.  The other team had control of the ball.  Von was a defensive lineman.  When the ball was snapped and the play began, the linemen hit each other.  Von laid on the field after all the other players walked away. 

OR…  

 

EXAMPLE 2

On October 30 of Von’s sophomore year, the Georgia Bulldogs were battling the University of Virginia. They trailed by seven points, and Virginia had the ball. Von took his place on the defensive line. The center snapped the ball. A mass of offensive linemen lurched toward Von, and he met them with equal force.

The play ended in a stack of tangled bodies.

One by one, the Virginia players got up and walked away. Von didn’t.

The second example appears in the published book.  Again it isn’t the information that is different; it is how the information is presented that is different. 

 Why did I begin

Fourth Down and Inches:

Concussions and Football's Make-or-Break Moment 

with Von Gammon? 

 

Because Von sustained a concussion and died a few hours later.  His death caused many to wonder if football was too dangerous.   
The year was 1897.  

Carla Killough McClafferty



BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Win an autographed copy Baby Says “Moo!” by JoAnn Early Macken.   For more details on the book and enter the book giveaway, see her blog entry on June 12, 2015.  The giveaway runs through June 22.  The winner will be announced on June 26.

A New Mark of Punctuation (sort of)...

So,

how to continue our TeachingAuthors  Punctuation theme while following Bobbi Miller’s most illuminating “For the Love of Commas” post last Monday?

I considered showcasing one of my favorite books (Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s EXCLAMATION MARK!, seemingly punctuation-themed or not),

interviewing University of Chicago Press editor Carol Saller (author of THE SUBVERSIVE COPYEDITOR)

and reviewing New Yorker editor Mary Norris’ BETWEEN YOU AND ME: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMA QUEEN. 

[Please note: In the above sentence I proudly reveal my Medicare-eligibility by honoring Strunk and White’s Elements of Style rule that states that “in a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.” It’s hard to teach an Old Dog New Tricks.]

I was heavily leaning toward sharing EXCLAMATION MARK! – a. because this particular punctuation mark and I have a whole lot in common, spirit-wise, and b. the front book blurb so speaks to me  “…we all have an inner exclamation mark. The question is, how to find it…”

But then, while reading Hannah Pittard’s beautifully-written all-absorbing novel REUNION which features a most engaging heart-grabbing dysfunctional family, I came upon a scene in which the character Kate Pulaski who teaches script-writing speaks a word the author acknowledges in her closing she found in a NY Times Ann Beattie article “Me and Mrs. Nixon” – a literary term I’d never seen or heard before! 

The word? 

Irmus.

     “I talked to Elliot about this on the plane,” she says.

     “Irmus,” I say.

     “What?”

     “Irmus,” I say.  “When you reveal the meaning at the end.”

     “What are you talking about?”

     …..”You said, ‘I talked to Elliot about this on the plane,’ but you haven’t yet said what this is. Presumably you are now going to define ‘this.’”

     “Do your students have any idea what you’re talking about?”

     “No,” I say.  “Nope. Not a word.”

I quickly marked my place in the novel to check the word’s official definition.

To my surprise, my Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary did not include an entry for irmus.

Upon Googling “irmus,” I came upon Chris Bonney and her October 25, 2011 post “A New Word.” (Apparently Hannah Pittard was not the only one who’d read Ann Beattie’s NY Times article “Me and Mrs. Nixon" and taken notice of this unusual word.)

Bonney wrote that according to the BOOK OF LITERARY TERMS, an irmus describes the phenomenon in which “not until the end of a passage does the reader fully understand what is being spoken of.”

She herself described irmus as “the periodic sentence, characterized by the suspension of the completion of sense until its end.”

In other words, an irmus acts like a punctuation mark, giving meaning and punch, emphasis and force, to the sentences that preceded it.

Or so I've told myself so I could share this term with you and hopefully give your day some punch. ;)

Personally, I feel so much more alive when a heretofore unknown word which surprisingly has relevance in my writer’s life takes residence on my brain’s Hard Drive.

I hope the same is true for you.

Esther Hershenhorn

For the Love of Comma

My kitty, Comma.
 

“What is one man’s colon is another man’s comma.” ~ Mark Twain

As a writing teacher, and a working writer, I found the greatest challenge is learning the fine art of punctuation. The secret, I discovered, is writing for the reader's eye. Understanding how the reader approaches text offers you key insight into how to write with clarity and grace.

 Readers approach the text by moving left to right. Readers interpret information by this forward projection. Readers expect subject-verb-object structures in sentences. They tend to focus on the verb that resolves the sentence's syntax, and in so doing, tend to resist information until after the verb is identified. This is why concrete subjects and action-oriented verbs carry the weight of the sentence. If the subject is vague or nonexistent, or the verb is passive, the sentence often falls apart.

Because readers project forward, they intuitively search for the subject, skimming over qualifying clauses or phrases that precede the subject. This becomes important in longer sentences, when the subject does not debut until mid-way or beyond. This is why subjects placed as close to the opening of the sentence as possible make for stronger sentences.

 Active voice maintains this forward process. It originates with the grammatical subject, flows through the verb, and results in an outcome. Some research suggests that readers understand and remember information more readily when structure corresponds to this cause-effect sequence. Passive structure forces this action in reverse: a subject is either implied or supplied in a subordinate phrase, and the outcome becomes the grammatical subject.

 The rhythm of a narrative is found in its punctuation. As sentences crash and fall “like the waves of the sea,” punctuation becomes the music of the language, says Noah Lukeman, in one of my favorite reads, A Dash of Style (2006).


Periods are the stop signs, says Lukeman, and hold the most power in the punctuation universe.

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All other marks – the comma, the dash, the colon and semi-colon, and so on – serve only to modify what lies between the periods. Sometimes a usurper, like the exclamation point or the question mark, intervenes, but its control is temporary. Imagine a book without periods, or a book that has periods after every word, and you begin to understand its supreme power.

 A well-placed period, especially in battle with one of its usurpers, helps pacing and adds emphasis. It speeds the narrative up in an action-sequence, heightening the drama. For example, can you hear the drum beat in this passage from my book, Girls of Gettysburg (Holiday House, 2014)?

Bayonets glistening in the hot sun, the wall of men stepped off the rise in perfect order. The cannoneers cheered as the soldiers moved through the artillery line, into the open fields.

The line had advanced less than two hundred yards when the Federals sent shell after shall howling into their midst.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The shells exploded, leaving holes where the earth had been. Shells pummeled the marching men. As one man fell in the front of the line, another stepped up to take his place. Smoke billowed into a curtain of white, thick and heavy as fog, stalking them across the field.

 Still they marched on. They held their fire, waiting for the order.

 Boom! A riderless horse, wide-eyed and bloodied, emerged from the cloud of smoke. It screamed in panic as another shell exploded.

Boom! All around lay the dead and dying. There seemed more dead than living now. Men fell legless, headless, armless, black with burns and red with blood.

Boom! They very earth shook with the terrible hellfire.

Still they marched on.

Long sentences can be very effective to heighten emotional drama even as it slows the action down. In another example from Girls of Gettysburg: “Dawn broke still as pond water, and the army was already on the march, moving east along the Pike. As the bloody sun broke free of the horizon, the mist rose, too. The air heated steadily, another hellfire day.”

But, as the cliché reminds us, there can be too much of a good thing (except chocolate, of course). A string of short sentences can become a choppy ride. Like riding in a Model T Ford. Stuck in the wrong gear. Chug! Chug! Chug! Going over a rutted road. It bounces. And bounces. And bounces. My head hurts. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Stop. This. Car. And. Let. Me. Out.

 And no one wants to read a sentence that never ends, one that goes on and on and on and on, in some stream-of-consciousness rambling of fanciful swooping and looping and drooping that serves no purpose other than to satisfy the writer’s ego.

If the period is the stop sign, then the comma is the speed bump, says Lukeman. It controls the ebb and flow of the sentence’s rhythm. A comma connects and divides. In fact, as Lukeman warns, it’s downright schizophrenic. It divides the sentences into parts, clarifying its meaning, or in some cases, changing its meaning. Consider this favorite Facebook meme: A woman, without her man, is nothing. But, with a wave of the magic punctuation wand, it changes to this: A woman: without her, man is nothing.

A comma connects smaller ideas to create a more powerful idea: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Everyone has heard the saying, placing a comma is like taking a breath in a sentence. But a sentence with too many commas sends the reader into hyperventilation. And one with not enough commas forces the reader to hold her breath unto she turns blue. So, where do you place your comma?

There are a thousand handbooks on punctuation, each offering a thousand rules on where and when to place a comma, and each rule has a thousand exceptions. Perhaps the better question is: what is your purpose in using the comma? As a stylistic devise, I offer that it’s one of the most emotive punctuation marks because it mimics the character’s state of mind. For example, from my Girls of Gettysburg, you know this poor character is frightened: “Weezy sang, quiet as a cricket’s whisper. But in the tiny room, in the dark, it seemed loud enough.”

Somewhere between the period and the comma is the semi-colon. This is the mediator, says Lukeman, and “a bridge between the two worlds.” With a style all its own, the semi-colon connects two thematically-related ideas while maintaining the independence of both.

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 It can be used to smooth out the choppy ride found in a string of short sentences, or give a breath of air in a long-winded sentence.

However, the semi-colon doesn’t always play well with others. It competes for attention with the comma. Because a semi-colon slows the action down, the effect of a comma and, most especially the period, is minimized.

And then there are colons. Colons are just plain bossy. They don't like to share. They especially don’t like semi-colons, despite the similar names. With a flair for the dramatic, colons are the master magicians: they reveal. (<See what I did there?) Colons hold the audience in suspense, says Lukeman. Then, at the right moment, the writer pulls the curtain back to reveal some fundamental truth of the narrative. Remember the Facebook meme example? A woman: without her, man is nothing.

But too often misunderstood and underappreciated, the colon tends to be reduced to mundane tasks, like signaling lists and offering summaries.

Then, of course, there are the dashes, ellipses, slashes and myriad of other punctuation marks. Alas, I’ve run out of space. In the end, as Noah Lukeman says, punctuation is organic, a complex universe subject to the writer’s purpose and personal tastes. What works in one narrative doesn’t work in every narrative. And for every rule, there is an exception. At its core, however, punctuation is a journey of self-awareness and reveals as much about the writer as it does about the writing.


For more information, you might find these useful:

Boyle, Toni and K.D. Sullivan. The Gremlins of Grammar. NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

Lukeman, Noah. A Dash of Style. NY: WW Norton, 2006.

Bobbi Miller

 “Punctuation in skilled hands is a remarkably subtle system of signals, signs, symbols and winks that keep readers on the smoothest road. Too subtle, perhaps: Has any critic or reviewer ever praised an author for being a master of punctuation, a virtuoso of commas? Has anyone every won a Pulitzer, much less a Nobel, for elegant distinctions between dash and colon, semi-colon and comma? ~ Rene J. Cappon, Associated Press Guide to Punctuation